The Spanish and Venetian ambassadors in London were shocked at what they regarded as the indecent rejoicings over Elizabeth’s accession. The nation, indeed, breathed a new life. Papal control of its ecclesiastical, and Accession of Elizabeth. English national struggle with Spain. Spanish control of its foreign policy ceased, and it had a queen who gloried in being “mere English.” There was really no possible rival sovereign, and no possible alternative policy. The English were tugging at the chain and Elizabeth had to follow; her efforts throughout were aimed at checking the pace at which her people wanted to go. She could not have married Philip had she wished to, and she could not have kept her sea-dogs off the Spanish Main. They were willing to take all the risks and relieve her of all responsibility; they filled her coffers with Spanish gold which they plundered as pirates, knowing that they might be hanged if caught; and they fought Elizabeth’s enemies in France and in the Netherlands as irregulars, taking their chance of being shot if taken prisoners. While Elizabeth nursed prosperity in peace, her subjects sapped the strength of England’s rivals by attacks which were none the less damaging because they escaped the name of war.
It required all Elizabeth’s finesse to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds; but she was, as Henry III. of France said, la plus fine femme du monde, and she was ably seconded by Cecil who had already proved himself an adept in the art of taking cover. Nevertheless, English policy in their hands was essentially aggressive. It could not be otherwise if England was to emerge from the slough in which Mary had left it. The first step was to assert the principle of England for the English; the queen would have no foreign husband, though she found suitors useful as well as attractive. Spanish counsels were applauded and neglected, and the Spaniards soon departed. Elizabeth was glad of Philip’s support at the negotiations for peace at Cateau Cambrésis (1559), but she took care to assert the independence Triumph of the new religion. The Act of Uniformity. of her diplomacy and of England’s interests. At home the church was made once more English. All foreign jurisdiction was repudiated, and under the style “supreme governor” Elizabeth reclaimed nearly all the power which Henry VIII. had exercised as “supreme head.” The Act of Uniformity (1559) restored with a few modifications the second prayer-book of Edward VI. The bishops almost unanimously refused to conform, and a clean sweep was made of the episcopal bench. An eminently safe and scholarly archbishop was found in Matthew Parker, who had not made himself notorious by resistance to authority even under Mary. The lower clergy were more amenable; the two hundred who alone are said to have been ejected should perhaps be multiplied by five; but even so they were not one in seven, and these seven were clergy who had been promoted in Mary’s reign, or who had stood the celibate and other tests of 1553-1554. Into the balance must be thrown the hundreds, if not thousands, of zealots who had fled abroad and returned in 1558-1559. The net result was that a few years later the lower house of convocation only rejected by one vote a very puritanical petition against vestments and other “popish dregs.”
The next step was to expand the principle of England for the English into that of Britain for the British, and Knox’s reformation in 1559-1560 provided an opportunity for its application. By timely and daring intervention Elizabeth and Scotland. in Scotland Elizabeth procured the expulsion of the French bag and baggage from North Britain, and that French avenue to England was closed for ever. The logic of this plan was not applied to Ireland; there it was to be Ireland for the English for many a generation yet to come; and so Ireland remained Achilles’ heel, the vulnerable part of the United Kingdom. The Protestant religion was forced upon the Irish in a foreign tongue and garb and at the point of foreign pikes; and national sentiment supported the ancient faith and the ancient habits in resistance to the Saxon innovations. In other directions the expansion of England, the third stage in the development of Elizabeth’s policy, was more successful. The attractions of the Spanish Main converted the seafaring folk of south-west England Struggle against the Spanish dominion at sea. into hardy Protestants, who could on conscientious as well as other grounds contest a papal allocation of new worlds to Spain and Portugal. Their monopoly was broken up by Hawkins, Drake, Frobisher, Raleigh, and scores of others who recognized no peace beyond the line; and although, as far as actual colonies went, the results of Elizabeth’s reign were singularly meagre, the idea had taken root and the ground had been prepared. In every direction English influence penetrated, and Englishmen before 1603 might be found in every quarter of the globe, following Drake’s lead into the Pacific, painfully breaking the ice in search of a north-east or a north-west passage, hunting for slaves in the wilds of Africa, journeying in caravans across the steppes of Russia into central Asia, bargaining with the Turks on the shores of the Golden Horn, or with the Greeks in the Levant, laying the foundations of the East India Company, or of the colonies of Virginia and Newfoundland.
This expansion was mainly at the expense of Spain; but at first Spain was regarded as Elizabeth’s friend, not France. France had a rival candidate for Elizabeth’s throne in Mary Stuart, the wife of the dauphin who soon Mary, queen of Scots. (1559) became king as Francis II.; and Spanish favour was sought to neutralize this threat. Fortunately for Elizabeth, Francis died in 1560, and the French government passed into the hands of Catherine de’ Medici, who had no cause to love her daughter-in-law and the Guises. France, too, was soon paralysed by the wars of religion which Elizabeth judiciously fomented with anything but religious motives. Mary Stuart returned to Scotland with nothing but her brains and her charms on which to rely in her struggle with her people and her rival. She was well equipped in both respects, but human passions spoilt her chance; her heart turned her head. Elizabeth’s head was stronger and she had no heart at all. When Mary married Darnley she had the ball at her feet; the pair had the best claims to the English succession and enjoyed the united affections of the Catholics. But they soon ceased to love one another, and could not control their jealousies. There followed rapidly the murders of Rizzio and Darnley, the Bothwell marriage, Mary’s defeat, captivity, and flight into England (1568). It was a difficult problem for Elizabeth to solve; to let Mary go to France was presenting a good deal more than a pawn to her enemies; to restore her by force to her Scottish throne might have been heroic, but it certainly was not politics; to hand her over to her Scottish foes was too mean even for Elizabeth; and to keep her in England was to nurse a spark in a powder-magazine. Mary was detained in the hope that the spark might be carefully isolated.
But there was too much inflammable material about. The duke of Norfolk was a Protestant, but his convictions were weaker than his ambition, and he fell a victim to Mary’s unseen charms. The Catholic north of England Rebellion of 1569 and excommunication of Elizabeth. was to rise under the earls of Westmorland and Northumberland, who objected to Elizabeth’s seizure of their mines and jurisdictions as well as to her proscription of their faith; and the pope was to assist with a bull of deposition. Norfolk, however, played the coward; the bull came nearly a year too late, and the rebellion of the earls (1569) was easily crushed. But the conspiracies did not end, and Spain began to take a hand. Elizabeth, partly in revenge for the treatment of Hawkins and Drake at San Juan de Ulloa, seized some Spanish treasure on its way to the Netherlands (Dec. 1569). Alva’s operations were fatally handicapped by this disaster, but Philip was too much involved in the Netherlands to declare war on England. But his friendship for Elizabeth Plots against Elizabeth. Relations with France and Spain. had received a shock, and henceforth his finger may be traced in most of the plots against her, of which the Ridolfi conspiracy was the first. It cost Norfolk his head and Mary more of her scanty liberty. Elizabeth also began to look to France, and in 1572, by the treaty of Blois, France instead of Spain became England’s ally, while Philip constituted himself as Mary’s patron. The massacre of St Bartholomew placed a severe strain upon the new alliance, but was not fatal to it. A series of prolonged but hollow marriage negotiations between Elizabeth and first Anjou (afterwards Henry III.) and then Alençon (afterwards duke of Anjou) served to keep up appearances. But the friendship was never warm; Elizabeth’s relations with the Huguenots on the one hand and her fear of French designs on the Netherlands on the other prevented much cordiality. But the alliance stood in the way of a Franco-Spanish agreement, limited Elizabeth’s sympathy with the French Protestants, and enabled her to give more countenance than she otherwise might have done to the Dutch.
Gradually Philip grew more hostile under provocation; slowly he came to the conclusion that he could never subdue the Dutch or check English attacks on the Spanish Main without a conquest of England. Simultaneously The Jesuit missions. the counter-Reformation began its attacks; the “Jesuit invasion” took place in 1580, and Campion went to the block. A papal and Spanish attempt upon Ireland in the same year was foiled at Smerwick. But more important was Philip’s acquisition of the throne of Portugal with its harbours, its colonies and its marine. This for the first time gave him a real command of the sea, and at least doubled the chances of a successful attack upon England. But Philip’s mind moved slowly and only on provocation. It took a year or two to satisfy him that Portugal was really his; not until 1583 was the fleet of the pretender Don Antonio destroyed in the Azores. The victor, Santa Cruz, then suggested an armada against England, but the English Catholics could not be brought into line with a Spanish invasion. The various attempts to square James VI. of Scotland had not been successful, and events in the Netherlands and in France disturbed Philip’s calculations. But his purpose was now probably fixed. After the murder of William the Silent (1584) Elizabeth sided more openly with the Dutch; the Spanish ambassador Mendoza was expelled from England Execution of Mary, queen of Scots, 1587. for his intrigues with Elizabeth’s enemies (1586); and on the discovery of Babington’s plot Elizabeth yielded to the demand of her parliament and her ministers for Mary’s execution (1587); her death removed the only possible centre for a Catholic rebellion in case of a Spanish attack. It also removed Philip’s last doubts; Mary had left him her claims to the English throne, and he might, now that she was out of his path, hope to treat England like Portugal. Drake’s “singeing of Philip’s beard” in Cadiz harbour in 1587 delayed the expedition for a year, and a storm again postponed it in the early summer of 1588. At length the armada sailed in July under the incompetent duke of Medina Sidonia; its object was to secure command of the narrow seas and facilitate the transport of Parma’s army from the Netherlands to England. But Philip after his twenty years’ experience in the Netherlands can hardly have hoped to conquer a bigger and richer country with scantier means and forces. He relied The Great Armada, 1588. in fact upon a domestic explosion, and the armada was only to be the torch. This miscalculation made it a hopeless enterprise from the first. Scarcely an English Catholic would have raised a finger in Philip’s favour; and when he could not subdue the two provinces of Holland and Zeeland, it is absurd to suppose that he could have simultaneously subdued them and England as well. English armies were not perhaps very efficient, but they were as good as the material with which William of Orange began his task. Philip, however, was never given the opportunity. His armada was severely handled in a week’s fighting on its way up the Channel, and was driven off the English ports into the German Ocean; there a south-west gale drove it far from its rendezvous, and completed the havoc which the English ships had begun. A miserable remnant alone escaped destruction in its perilous flight round the north and west of Scotland.
The defeat of the armada was the beginning and not the end of the war; and there were moments between 1588 and 1603 when England was more seriously alarmed than in 1588. The Spaniards seized Calais in 1596; at another time they threatened England from Brest, and the “invisible” armada of 1599 created a greater panic than the “invincible” armada of 1588. It was not till the very end of the reign that what was in some ways the most dangerous of Spanish aggressions was foiled at Kinsale. Nor were the English counter-attacks very happy; the attempt on Portugal in 1589 under Drake and Norris proved a complete failure. The raid on Cadiz under Essex and Raleigh in 1596 was attended with better results, but the “Islands” voyage to the Azores in 1597 was a very partial success. Still it was now a war upon more or less equal terms, and there was little more likelihood that it would end with England’s than with Spain’s loss of national independence. The subjection of the Netherlands was now almost out of the question, and although Elizabeth’s help had not enabled the Protestant cause to win in France, Henry IV. built up a national monarchy which would be quite as effectual a bar to the ambitions of Spain.
Elizabeth had in fact safely piloted England through the struggle to assert its national independence in religion and politics and its claim to a share in the new inheritance which had been opened up for the nations of Europe; Last years of Elizabeth. and the passionate loyalty which had supported her as the embodiment of England’s aspirations somewhat cooled in her declining years. She herself grew more cautious and conservative than ever, and was regarded as an obstacle by the hotheads in war and religion. She sided with the “scribes,” Burghley and Sir Robert Cecil, against the men of war, Essex and Raleigh; and she abetted Whitgift’s rigorous persecution of the Puritans whose discontent with her via media was rancorously expressed in the Martin Marprelate tracts. Essex’s folly and failure to crush Hugh O’Neill’s rebellion (1599), the most serious effort made in the reign to throw off the English yoke in Ireland, involved him in treason and brought him to the block. Parliament was beginning to quarrel with the royal prerogative, particularly when expressed in the grant of monopolies, and even Mountjoy’s success in Ireland (1602-1603) failed to revive popular enthusiasm for the dying queen. Strange as it may seem, the accession of James I. was hailed as heralding a new and gladder age by Shakespeare, and minor writers (March 24, 1603).
(A. F. P.)
VIII. The Stuart Monarchy, the Great Rebellion and the Restoration (1603-1689)